Microfinance in Mexico: The role of small loans

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My latest post on the credit bubble in Mexico had one especially interesting comment. Jose Manuel asked to consider the loan sizes in the country as a factor that might explain the prevalence of multiple borrowing.

The comment is highly relevant. What Jose Manuel suggests is that loans in Mexico are unusually small. And in a way, he is right. On a per capita GNI basis, Mexico's loans are smaller than in any other country. By contrast, India's loans are nearly three times larger.[1] This has two potential implications: first, small microfinance loans put less of a burden on Mexican borrower incomes, and second, their inadequate size encourages clients to borrow from multiple lenders in order to meet their requirements. And yet, I find that both implications are incorrect and that multiple borrowing levels in Mexico continue to point to a very large bubble.

Multiple borrowing as sign of success

It has been often noted by practitioners that microfinance loans are by design insufficient to meet the needs of some microentepreneurs. Indeed, SKS founder Vikram Akula argued this very point in his letter to the Wall Street Journal in August 2009 – a year before the Andhra Pradesh crisis. In addition to this well-accepted fact, Akula also cited a study conducted in Andhra Pradesh in 2007 that found clients with multiple loans having better repayment rates. Here is how I described this study, when warning of an oncoming crisis in Andhra Pradesh five years ago:

The Krishnaswamy study found that multiple borrowers, representing 7-10% of clients in his sample, consisted primarily of highly motivated entrepreneurs seeking to raise more capital than what was offered by any one MFI. This is unsurprising – due to the nature of their cycle-based lending model, MFIs knowingly underfund their borrowers, thus assembling funds from multiple MFIs is a logical strategy that Krishnaswamy suggests is simply a replacement for the informal funding sources the individuals would have tapped otherwise. This is also consistent with the money management practices documented by Collins et. al. in Portfolios of the Poor. However, as the market heats up and multiple borrowing becomes increasingly widespread, the number of multiple borrowers grows beyond these stand-out individuals…

On this point, I haven't changed my mind – it isn't multiple borrowing itself that concerns me, but rather, the channel through which it occurs. There is a subtle, yet enormous difference between a motivated entrepreneur seeking out additional capital for her business by soliciting multiple MFIs, and a borrower who takes on another loan that's actively – or even aggressively – pushed by a loan officer looking to meet his monthly bonus quota. In Mexico, I suspect there is a lot more of the latter than of the former.

Market equilibrium

So what about the loan size in Mexico? Recall that main reason why microfinance loans are often too small is that loan size is used as a way of establishing repayment history for clients who don't already have one. With each loan repaid on time, clients become eligible for a larger loan amount. But that figure doesn't increase forever – once credit history is established, repayment capacity becomes the limiting factor, and not necessarily how many prior loans the borrower may have had.

This suggests that, as microfinance markets mature, the mechanism for setting loan amounts begins to look more like traditional retail lending. And so, driven by the laws of supply and demand, the loan size in established microfinance markets should arrive at an equilibrium.

On the supply side, lenders would prefer to lend as much as their clients need, but not more than they are able to repay. After all, it takes roughly the same amount of effort to evaluate a client for a smaller loan as for a larger one, so larger loans should increase profits. For lenders, purposefully lending less than is tantamount to leaving free money on the table – an unlikely outcome for profit-driven institutions.

On the demand side, borrowers face a similar dynamic. Each loan application and repayment process consumes time, expense, or both (e.g. sitting in group meetings, traveling to a branch), which normally borrowers would prefer to minimize. All else equal, borrowers would thus prefer fewer loans.

The intersection of these two drivers – lenders seeking to maximize profits and borrowers seeking to minimize costs – would set the equilibrium loan size. Of course, microfinance isn't quite so simple.

To this basic model, one should add a few adjustments. For some larger amounts, lenders may find funding the full amount to be excessively risky, even if the borrower's repayment capacity is not in doubt. In such cases, the lender may well expect the borrower to supplement the offered loan with loans from competing MFIs. On the borrower side, the inflexibility of microfinance disbursement and repayment cycles may lead clients to seek additional loans on top of their existing ones. And of course, there are the exceptional clients whose risk tolerance and business acumen prompts them to seek out funds than MFIs would normally be unwilling to provide. In short, some level of multiple borrowing is a natural feature in microfinance markets. The question is how much?

It is here that comparisons to other markets are useful. After all, are Mexican borrowers so much more business-savvy or have so much more volatile incomes that they require a larger number of multiple loans to manage their funding needs? Likewise, are Mexican lenders really so extraordinarily risk averse that they make it standard practice to give away the extra profit they could receive by lending larger amounts, and instead expect their clients to go borrow more from competing MFIs? Indeed, what reason is there to think that the market equilibrium for loan sizes in Mexico is governed by rules that are so vastly divergent from everywhere else?

So why are loans in Mexico small?

If the above theory is right, the answer should be that Mexican loans aren't big or small – they're exactly right for their market. So why do they seem small?

Consider first the per capita GDP ratio (or its close cousin, GNI, preferred by MIX Market). At first glance, it seems a reasonable proxy for comparing the levels of client indebtedness. But it's not. First, the per capita GNI comparison is normally used as an indicator for depth of outreach – how poor are the clients of the MFI? By that argument, the figures in Mexico imply that the country's MFIs serve clients who are substantially poorer than the average Mexican.

As it happens, there is some data that helps to get a sense of comparison. According to the Banerjee/Duflo study in Andhra Pradesh, the average household income consumption for MFI clients in 2010 was 11,497 Rs/month, which translates to 68% of India's per capita GNI that year. Meanwhile, the Angelucci/Karlan study of Compartamos cites household income per adult at 1,571 pesos/month, which translates to 17% of Mexico's per capita GNI.[2] Thus, in the relative terms of per capita GNI, the typical microfinance borrower in Mexico is four times poorer than her counterpart in Andhra Pradesh.

Clearly, using per capita GDP (or GNI) as a proxy for loan size relative to borrower incomes vastly overstates the incomes of typical microfinance clients in Mexico.

Interest rates, again…

The other major reason why Mexican loans may seem small is that what's being measured is the loan amount, which is not at all the same as the total obligation undertaken by the borrower. With an average portfolio yield of 82.3%, Mexican loans are unusually expensive – more than three times the average yield of 26.6% for MFIs worldwide in 2012 or the yields in India and Bosnia during their market peaks (25% and 24%, respectively).[3]

The impact of such differences on client cash flows is quite dramatic – a client holding 4 loans with an 80% interest rate faces a total payment obligation that's nearly the same as a client with 6 loans at 25% interest. The stress on borrower cash flows in Mexico is thus much larger than the loan amount alone would indicate.

Back to the bubble

Thus far, the high prevalence of multiple loans in Mexico has been my primary indicator of a microfinance bubble in Mexico. I recognize that for any single client, multiple loans are a poor indicator of repayment capacity – exceptional entrepreneurs or individuals with particularly volatile incomes may well need multiple loans to meet their needs. The question is not whether any one client has multiple loans, but whether their overall prevalence in the market indicates overheating.

I've tried to show that the size of the loans in Mexico does not imply less financial stress on borrowers or a higher propensity to take on multiple loans. Ultimately, their size is governed by the same laws of supply and demand, whose equilibrium is unlikely to differ much from other markets.

If we accept that the figures for multiple borrowing at market peaks in Bosnia and Andhra Pradesh reflect the limits of those markets' credit capacity, and we observe that multiple lending in Mexico is far above those levels, then we should also recognize that Mexican microfinance has likewise exceeded its credit capacity, and what we're in fact seeing is a very large bubble.

[1] Weighted average loan size = 3.9% of per capita GNI in Mexico, and 11.0% in India. For each MFI, loans weighted by number of active borrowers. Source: MIX Market 2012 data.

[2] For India, average number of adults in survey household was 4, so assuming that all income is consumed, per adult income is calculated at 2,874 Rs/month. GNI per capita is expressed in current USD (Atlas method), i.e. not adjusted for purchasing power parity, so as to be consistent with loan sizes, which likewise aren't adjusted by PPP. There may be some differences in foreign exchange rates used to express loan size in USD (Oanda.com, 12/31/2010 for both countries), which may not fully correspond to the World Bank Atlas method. The samples in the Hyderabad and Compartamos studies should not be taken as representative of microfinance clients in either country (for example, Hyderabad is relatively wealthy, as are the areas surveyed in Mexico); however, the data is sufficient to demonstrate that Mexican client incomes are substantially smaller than the country's per capita GNI than is the case for Indian clients.

[3] MIX Market 2012

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Daniel Rozas is a Senior Microfinance Expert at e-MFP and a consultant and researcher on a broad range of topics. Daniel is also co-founder of the MIMOSA project, which provides a methodological assessment of market saturation and risk of overindebtedness for leading microfinance markets. Prior to his microfinance career, Daniel worked for the US mortgage investment company Fannie Mae during 2001-08, where he had first-hand experience with the extraordinary boom-and-bust cycle that took place in the US mortgage market during this period. Daniel resides in Brussels, Belgium, and holds an MBA from the University of Maryland and an undergraduate degree in music from the Peabody Conservatory.

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Comments (1)

I´ve read your interesting note about the roll of the small loans in Mexico and I can help resolving some of your questions about the Mexican MFI Market.

First of all, let me introduce myself. I´m Marco and during for 12 years I´ve worked into MFI Industry in México and I´ve seen how the mexican mfi market evolved from NGO´s institutions to bizarre market where coexist regulated, non regulated organisations, high lucrative institutions and sustainable organisations.

Since the microfinances market starts in the middle decade of 90´s, the interest rate always was high, the village banking technology was the predominant business model up to today and the small loans were the common. But it had a important difference, those NGO´s were searching to help low incomes people to move out poverty. In those days, help people was sharing by NGO´s microfinances in Mexico.

However, many mexican investors watched in microfinances an opportunity to gain money of easy way, we should remember that investors said poor people do not have ability to pay however Compartamos Bank opened to mexican financial executives eyes that poverty sector could be profitable.

Since then a huge numbers of “sofomes” have born, most of them have copied the compartamos model in essence; each copy of the model has been worse than original. It is thus companies have developed their own methodology mixed village banking, lending group and individual credit technologies.

I believe small loans have been a consequence of the village banking model. Today many organisations disburse credit under this technology, and they tried to increase amounts of loans using this model but results have not worked at all.

A few organisations are looking for new technologies as lending group or individual loans to get higher amounts of credit. Most of them are afraid to change a new technology because it is a change to invest in training, procedures and a new way to disburse credit. In fact, few institutions know to give credit correctly, most of organisations do not have a formal credit process. Today institutions lend credit over savings in guarantee nor the ability to pay, the last sentence has damaged clients a lot.

I´ve heard voices who said Mexican MFI Market is a mature market, I don´t agree with those voices because I understand a mature market as an environment where industry establish their rules to mantain privileges and do not benefit customers. Microcredit market in Mexico fights each other to get profits regardless customers and the market it self. I rate it as teenager market.

I conclude that small loans in Mexico are motivated by an immature market where organisations don´t have a formal credit process and them copied the technology of the market leader; likewise small loans are fed by fear to change other technology. They do not have any motivation to enhance theirs credit process because they get profits, non regulated institutions are not required to have “estimaciones preventivas contra riesgos crediticios”.

It is curios with a higher competence in progress this not mean a low interest rate movement but Over-indebtedness effects in clients. Organisations have started to increase amount of credit as a way to break away competence.

Otherwise, government has been a passive actor, Mexico Banking Commission only can supervise the regulated institutions and has been rigid to accept new members (the main benefit of regulated institutions is to able to receive saving from clients) however “sofomes” can give credit with no restrictions in rate interest, non credit bureau score, non create “estimaciones preventivas”, to get savings by clients without register in their balances, etc and they are not supervising by banking commission. This kind of contradictions may have incited bad corporative practices in MFI.

I am convinced Mexican MFI market could disburse credit in best conditions like low interest rate, high amounts and without over-indebtedness clients, in other words, to disburse credit more responsibly. It is important to create self regulation and active participation of Mexican authorities.

Low incomes people in Mexico is not so different that others poor people latinamerican countries , in fact, sometimes poverty in Mexico is softer than African and Asian countries. Then small loans are effect of bad practices than economic ability of customers in my position.